Making Science Relevant and Accessible to Young Teens - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Making Science Relevant and Accessible to Young Teens. Janet L. Kolodner Interactive Computing Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA. Problems in Science Ed. Kids don’t see the relevance of science to their lives, so many never engage.

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They are not bad, but they also do not use everything we know about promoting sustained engagement and deep learning

There are software packages that can be used to promote deep learning of particular science and appreciation of simulation and modeling

E.g., Netlogo and its variants

Particular short units integrated with technology abound

E.g., WISE and the simulations and animations that go with it

There are teacher professional development collaboratives

But none fully address the issues of engaging children over several years, integrating the full range of scientific disciplines, and focusing on promoting disposition, flexible scientific reasoning, AND deep transferrable learning of content.

Learning is a process of iteratively constructing, revising, and connecting together mental models -- models of what we know and models of how to do things.

We know we need to learn something when a mental model doesn’t do the work we want it to do -- either we can’t do something we want to do or something turns out differently than we expected or something happens that we weren’t expecting and we can’t explain.

Repeated deliberative practice in contexts where learners have opportunities to experience results of their decisions can lead to mental-model building

We need each other’s ideas to succeed; it’s gratifying if we do; it’s important to give and great to get credit; designers, scientists and engineers build on what others do; importance of tradeoffs, iteration, and defining project goals well; science of structures

Drops on a cookie

We need to be precise about what we are doing to come up with solutions; we need to explain well so others can replicate; results are gratifying if we do that

Whirlygig challenge

Being precise about experimental methods allows others to be able to use your results (and that’s useful and gratifying); data derived from experiments provides evidence for decision making and allows persuasion

Scientists explain the best they can given what they know

Gravity and air resistance; combining forces

Parachute challenge

When we decide together what we need to do, we can each be really creative and different anyway; we need each other for data gathering; we need each other for ideas; iterating toward a solution and iterating toward better understanding go hand in hand; precision …

Gravity and air resistance; combining forces

IDEO video and shopping cart challenge

Really cool designers do all this same stuff to succeed; it requires effort but is gratifying in the end; mistakes are necessary, so are dumb ideas; investigation is needed; iteration really is needed,...

What have we learned about being scientists and engineers? What’s useful about what we’ve learned?

In one comparison, honors low-income LBD students performed as well or better than comparison (non-LBD) high-income honors students on these same performance assessment tasks.

Teacher expertise and class level play important roles in student gains for both comparisons and LBD students, but when teachers with high content knowledge and good inquiry-based skills are compared, students who used LBD master the content at a much deeper level than students using other learning materials.

As teachers gained experience with the approach, students gained more.

A culture of collaboration and rigorous science talk develops in classes where the teacher “trusts” the curriculum and the kids. Kids engage as and “feel like” student scientists when this culture is developed.

Kids have an awareness, want, and appreciation of the need to collaborate.

They have awareness, want, and appreciation of the need for rigor in collecting and using evidence, using the vocabulary of a domain, and justifying decisions. Some are aware of what’s required for a rigorous explanation.

They have some skills for engaging in these practices with some fluency, and they value their skills (e.g., science fair, investigation expos and plan briefings, critiques of the investigations of others)

Teachers need to experience the sequencing themselves to appreciate the way it works and what their roles need to be.

Best if they have a chance to work with students in a summer camp situation and see that it really works.

Teachers need help with the science content as well as with the unit activities and certainly with the approach.

Follow-up during the school year is important; one good way to do things is to get teachers for as long as possible during the summer to introduce the approach and help them learn the Launcher, then meet at regular intervals to introduce the next unit and discuss their experiences.

Help students form the frameworks for mental models, then help them fill them in, revise them, and connect them.

Help learners experience results of their decisions; help learners interpret those results and use them to debug their reasoning and understanding; repeat over and over again -- repeated deliberative practice

What have we learned about collaborating? What have we learned about designing? What have we learned about …? Which things do we want to continue doing? How will we make those things work? ... (there’s something personal in this articulation based on experience, I think)

Scientific reasoning and project and design skills are threaded throughout

Each activity affords learning many things; each class articulates only some of its lessons; each child takes away some of those; connections are regularly made during discussions; experiences can be/are referred back to later to extract other of the lessons that can be learned from them.

Adaptability -- learners work on multiple large challenges throughout a year and over several years; each time with a different small group; each one requiring different performances

Complex communication and social interactions -- sharing during presentations, working around the project board together, needing each other in small groups, needing results of other groups, requires that challenges be complex enough that learners do, indeed, need each other

Hong Kong Education Ministry

Non-routine problem solving project-based inquiry, or design-based classrooms -- learners work on problems with many good answers, they share ideas and compare solutions; over a year or years, they experience much variety

Self-management -- a key in LBD, and LBD supports learning to do this through Launcher Units, scripted activity structures that make sequencing second nature, scaffolding that helps learners be successful engaging in activities, and foregrounding of practices and reflection on them that helps learners examine what they are doing and how to successfully achieve their goals

Systems thinking -- comes with the territory IFF you have learners working towards achieving challenges that require systems thinking, provide support for success, and foreground systems thinking when examining and debugging reasoning

Content and skills are introduced and practiced in contexts in which they are authentically needed (short-term goals)

Skills and practices are repeated, and learners experience how valuable they are (suggesting long-term goals)

Learners interpret their experiences productively by taking advantage of what middle school kids like to do -- show off. They make presentations to each other.

When a solution doesn’t quite work or learners are short of ideas, they know they do not understand or did not reason well enough; in parallel, they iterate towards working solutions, better understanding, and better capabilities.

Students work in small groups, reflect in small groups, share with the whole class, reflect and debug as a class.